


The Alexandria You Are Losing

by blackberrychai



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Ambiguous Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), But it's not Crimson Flower, Character Study, Enbarr, F/F, I spend too much time thinking about edelgard's relationship with her people and this is the result, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by Poetry, Introspection, Operas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:15:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26881276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackberrychai/pseuds/blackberrychai
Summary: go firmly to the windowand listen with deep emotion, but notwith the whining, the pleas of a coward;listen—your final delectation—to the voices,to the exquisite music of that strange procession,and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.—C. P. CavafyOn the eve of the capture of Enbarr, Edelgard looks out over her city.
Relationships: Dorothea Arnault/Edelgard von Hresvelg
Comments: 5
Kudos: 32





	The Alexandria You Are Losing

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to Mel for looking this over for me, and eternal thanks to Cavafy for making me cry.

> _The God Abandons Antony_
> 
> _When suddenly, at midnight, you hear  
>  an invisible procession going by  
> with exquisite music, voices,  
> don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,  
> work gone wrong, your plans  
> all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.  
> As one long prepared, and graced with courage,  
> say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.  
> Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say  
> it was a dream, your ears deceived you:  
> don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.  
> As one long prepared, and graced with courage,  
> as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,  
> go firmly to the window  
> and listen with deep emotion, but not  
> with the whining, the pleas of a coward;  
> listen—your final delectation—to the voices,  
> to the exquisite music of that strange procession,  
> and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing._
> 
> _—C. P. Cavafy_

* * *

Enbarr is quiet tonight. The city is said to never sleep, and that must still be true, because this silence could never be mistaken for sleep. Restless tension lies underneath everything, like a cord being pulled so tight its fibres begin to twist apart.

Edelgard stands alone on the ramparts of the palace, her palace, moving uneasily from one guardpost to the next. She nods as she passes her men, their deferential salutes grating on her nerves. She should say something, she knows, reassure them, soothe them, inspire them—but that is beyond her. Tonight, of all nights, that is so far beyond her.

She walks only because not moving is unbearable. Most of her day has been spent at her desk, leafing through piles of papers that Hubert tirelessly presents her with, making last minute decisions on troop placements, marshalling the city’s defences for the battle to come. When that was done, more tasks from her endless list presented themselves. First, inspecting her personal battalion. Second, ensuring the palace kitchens are well-provisioned enough to feed her massed forces—good food is hard to come by, these days, but tonight at least, they deserve to be well-fed. Third—oh, she forgets.

Perhaps she should be alarmed that a day only just finished is already fog in her memory. But when all her days of late are so undifferentiated, it’s hard to muster the energy to care. At least up here, looking out across Enbarr, she feels a little freer.

The whole city is built to protect the palace, the buildings swarming around in regimented blocks, ready to fend off an assault before the palace can even be reached. Her eldest sister had told her once that Enbarr was a castle, and the palace not a separate construction, but merely the heart of it. She usually avoids thinking of it like that, avoids any reminder of her siblings, but with an army camped at the gates of the city, it’s an irresistible comparison.

If the palace is the heart, she wonders, does it even beat? People run through its passageways like lifeblood, to be sure, but she sometimes finds herself sitting unmoving in her throne room at the centre of the centre, and the stone arteries feel so still around her. Perhaps all she has done, in her scant few years occupying that seat, is force a little more movement out of the dying corpse of this lumbering beast. With the city so unmoving outside the walls of the palace, it truly does feel like a dying thing. The people, her people, who she has forced into battle time after time, are quiet in a way that does not reassure her.

As she rounds the corner of a tower, the opera house comes into view to the west. It is lit up brilliantly, a beacon amid the dim mosaic that makes up the rest of Enbarr. Most of the citizens can’t afford much more than candles and dull oil lamps, but the opulence of the opera house outstrips all of that. Magical lights hang from the facade, and illuminate its sculptures and intricate carvings. Inside, the chandeliers cast their glow out through the wide windows, into the square outside. From this high up, suspended above her city like some kind of remote angel, Edelgard can only just make out the shadows of people milling around the square, or the flickers of light when someone passes in front of a window.

Her own tower, the one housing the emperor’s rooms, is between her and the opera house now, and it blocks part of the view. From the top of it, she can just see the grand staircase that winds through the central foyer. Sometimes she stands there, and imagines she can pick out the faces of the elegant figures who like to display themselves there before performances start.

Tonight, as on all the nights where she stands and watches the opera house, she firmly does not think of Dorothea. Dorothea, who had turned down accommodation in the palace in favour of her tiny garret room above the opera. Dorothea, who perches above the city just as Edelgard does, but among old friends, comrades in arms in an entirely different way to those she has fought beside. Dorothea, who hates and loves this city in roughly equal measure, balancing the two on a knife-edge in her heart just as the city itself balances the glitter and the grime.

“Please,” Edelgard had said, the last time she had seen her. “Come back with me. You will be safer in the palace.” A city in the middle of war is a desperate place, and desperation and safety have never lived well together.

Dorothea’s smile was as beautiful as ever, but it had gained such bitterness in these last years. “Edie, you know I can’t,” she had said, gathering the soft sheets of her bed around her bare breasts. “I’m needed here.”

Edelgard had turned her face away, stared out of Dorothea’s narrow window so she could avoid her eyes. “What if there are other places you are needed?” she asks.

The light chime of her laughter is changed too, nowadays. “We are all needed in a thousand places now, unfortunately,” she says.

Edelgard had stayed silent at that, until she heard the rustle of fabric behind her, and felt Dorothea’s arms wrap around her, the warmth of her burning through the thin slip that was all she had left on. She let herself sigh, then, enjoying the sensation of Dorothea’s hair brushing against her neck, and leaned back into her.

“You are the one most needed, you know,” Dorothea whispered in her ear. “You have your responsibilities, and you tend to them diligently. Can you not understand that in my own small way, I do too?”

“Of course I do,” Edelgard said softly, and sighed again. “I am sorry. I do not mean to imply that what you do is unimportant. Just that I wish it did not keep you away from me.”

“It’s hardly important compared to affairs of state,” Dorothea replied lightly, releasing Edelgard and going back to the bed to return the sheet.

 _Of far more importance_ , Edelgard had wanted to shout at her, thinking of the last time she had been able to spare the time for the opera. _Do you not see the way that faces turn to you in the theatre, the way you soothe the fear that lines them with a single note?_

She did not say it. And now, standing here alone, all she can think is that she is the one who had given rise to all those fears. Self-doubt is not something she likes to indulge in, but of late it has wrapped itself around her, hooked its fingers under her ribcage, forced her to watch an army march into her lands, and whispered into her ear _see what you have done_.

Turning, Edelgard tears herself away from the distant lights of the opera house. She gathers her cloak around herself, burying her face in the dark wool. Taking the next door back inside, she walks through the quiet corridors, forcing herself to smile for the harried-looking servants who bow deferentially to her when she passes. The palace is too large, she has often thought, and tonight especially so, even though she has nowhere to hurry to.

She will not sleep tonight, she knows, but she returns to her bedchamber anyway. Surrounded by her too-comfortable furniture, she sinks down in the well of her windows, and slowly begins to unwind her hair.

It pulls at her head, done up like this, makes it ache at the end of long days spent attempting to bend recalcitrant nobles to her cause, but she will not give it up now. It is her armour as surely as anything she has ever worn on the battlefield. When it hangs loose around her shoulders, she casts aside the headdress, and begins to pull her fingers through it. It slips against itself, soft and smooth, but it is also frail and easily snapped. She tugs at a knot, and the hair breaks. She lets the silver strands fall to the floor.

The cloak is next, thrown easily aside, and her cold fingers begin to fumble at the buttons of her crimson coat. She had not realised she was cold until now, but the clumsiness of her hands is undeniable, and she begins to shiver. She straightens her shoulders, raises her head, and her muscles obey her, stilling. The coat is gone soon, and so are the rest of her heavy outer garments, somehow thick but never warm. Edelgard has always been prone to cold, ever since she returned to her place in court so long ago, too thin and too pale. Even the warmth of Adrestia’s climate does little for her nowadays.

In her thin shift, she climbs back into the window seat, and hunches in on herself, stares at the white fabric stretched between her knees. The cold seems immaterial now, just part of her surroundings, something she wears in the same way that she wears the scars that wind over her body. She sinks into it, even, revels in the thrum of her warm pulse despite the goosebumps on her arms. The cold is proof that she is still warm, still alive.

Then a sound outside the palace makes her start up, pulling her eyes away from the contemplation of the threads within the fine linen of her shift. There is music somewhere, distant but clear in the hush of the night. It is coming from beyond the walls of the palace, somewhere out in her city, and a familiar pang rushes over Edelgard. It’s a summons she can’t resist, and it pulls at her stomach. She gathers herself, comes to her feet, pulls herself away from the dark window that shows her only dead stone and greying trees. She hesitates for a moment over her discarded clothes. She pushes aside the heavy coat, the endless layers, and pulls boots onto her bare feet, then wraps herself securely in her thick cloak.

She runs, opening door after door, cursing the endless series of rooms that being Emperor entitles one to occupy, and rushes up the stairs of her corner tower. She is not far from the top, luckily—it’s something she appreciates on the many nights she cannot sleep. The roof of the tower is only a few floors above her rooms, and she can climb the steep stairs quickly, to emerge onto heavily guarded ramparts, breathe in the scent of smoke rising from Enbarr’s many chimneys.

Usually, she sends her guards away, wanting to be alone with the faint stars, and observe the city below her without her every move being watched. Tonight, though, when she throws open the door, the guards are as transfixed as she is, and she could never have the heart to force them away.

Beyond the walls of the palace, in the great square where the opera house towers over pretty little fountains, is light, and sound, and people. The orchestra of the opera have set themselves up on the grand steps outside, and in front of them stands a cluster of richly dressed people, wearing the finest of the costume department’s products, and glittering with jewels made from glass and paste. In front of the orchestra, sound lifting her forward, stands Dorothea.

Something hidden deep inside Edelgard feels warmly vindicated to have her old casual thought that she could recognise Dorothea’s voice from a mile away validated. She is not the only one singing, but her voice lifts high and clear over the others, twining around them in a dance Edelgard could never hope to understand.

She runs to the edge of the ramparts, feeling like a child again, and stares out at the warm circle of light, the shapes of her people lining the square. Something warm surges up from her stomach. This is so… so perfectly Dorothea, and even if she could not pick out her voice, Edelgard would be able see her fingerprints all over this anyway. Tonight, with the enemy at the gates, the whole city hangs on the edge of despair. But there, too, is Dorothea’s voice, telling them all that for tonight, at least, they must remember this: they are alive.

To Edelgard, it says this: Enbarr is her city, her castle, and it will survive her.

She isn’t sure how long she stands there, how long the performance lasts. At some point, hot tears start to burn from her eyes, and they run tracks of warmth over her cheeks before they fall. She doesn’t even bother to brush them away, just gazes at the square, at the opera house, at Dorothea.

When it draws to a close, the last notes hang like smoke in the air, and then Edelgard’s city erupts into cheers, applause, sobs. Somehow, the voices of so many people are suddenly far more distant, far smaller than the music made by just a fraction of the people. She turns, and sees her guards focused wholly on what is happening beyond the walls, their cheeks as wet as hers. She listens to her city cheer, and then she slips back inside, and descends again into the deep quiet.

When she reaches her rooms, Edelgard throws open every window that she passes, lets in the sounds of people, glad to her bones to be done with the wretched silence that had encased the city before. Back in her bedchamber, she sinks into the armchair by the fireplace, and drapes her cloak over herself like a blanket.

For a long while, she just stares into the flames, watches the logs pop and the tongues twist. Occasionally, a stick will burn through in the wrong place, and its charred end will collapse into the centre of fire. They send up puffs of ash when they land, and the dust swirls up on the hot currents of air, disappearing up the chimney.

In her more fatalistic moments, that is rather how Edelgard thinks of herself. She is a branch, overextended, and the flames she once so grandiosely named herself after lick at her heels. Sometimes, she opens the wardrobe where her old robes and mask hang, and stares at the garb of the Flame Emperor for a while. She does not put them on, though. Has not in years. She is not so naive any more as to think that fire will not burn the one who lights it.

But tonight, ensconced in the heart of the city, her city, Edelgard does not care how it ends. It is fruitless to doubt the course she has set herself on so irrevocably, so long ago. Now, the answer to her own fire waits outside her gates. Perhaps it is Edelgard’s turn to burn. But now, tonight, she sits in the heart of her city, and falls asleep by the fire.


End file.
